


Idylls of the Queen

by toujours_nigel



Category: Arthurian Mythology
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Gender or Sex Swap, I mean, Implied/Referenced Incest, Past Incest, Past Rape/Non-con, Referenced violence, Rule 63, Scars, also maybe an exploration of kink, it's an arthurian story, it's just... background information, newly weds have a serious conversation, strictly verbal though, the adult-est thing here is a woman in her underthings, the incest is hardly a spoiler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 14:37:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15415164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: Arthes is a body stitched together with rawhide and silk, needles dipped in boiling wine, and the sure and untender hands of battleground surgeons.





	Idylls of the Queen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [avani](https://archiveofourown.org/users/avani/gifts).
  * Inspired by [RULE 63 Arthuriana](https://archiveofourown.org/works/889618) by [toujours_nigel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel). 



> I was prompted Arthur (any version including the gender swap) for 5 scars, so natch I went for that. Names should be fairly easy to guess, but are also there in end-notes.

Arthes is a body stitched together with rawhide and silk, needles dipped in boiling wine, and the sure and untender hands of battleground surgeons. Gwynfor, undressing her their first night together, stops and swallows with her brooch in his hand, as the falling cloak reveals the scar crossing her right shoulder at the clavicle, and descending thence into the folds of her tunic of scarlet and purple, made new for the wedding.

“You can ask,” she tells him, reaching to ease the pin from his hand: iron, and sharper than it need be, and difficult to force through the tight weave of tunic and cloak. Morgant’s doing, sure as the dragon heads with their eyes of darting emerald. “Or you can run tell your father you have made a mistake, and in a year’s time we will sing you to a marriage bed with some girl your age with a sweet voice and skin your hands will not catch on.”

“No,” the boy says, and closes trembling fingers over her brooch and tucks the hand for good measure behind his back, thumb snagging his tooled leather belt and pulling his braccae snug about the waist. “No.”

“If it’s the alliance,” Arthes says, hands tugging her cloak securely up and over her shoulders, curling into its warm coarseness, “then you must wait many years yet. I will not send Mererid to her marriage-bed early.”

“No,” Gwynfor says again, pale skin staining red, shining eyes lowered. “I do not want her.”

“If you like neither royal woman,” Arthes says, pretending it is no struggle to keep her voice low and steady, as sweet as she can force it, “then tomorrow your father and my brother and I can sit in council again and come to what decisions we can. Do you think me some Roman grandfather, pushing you unwilling into marriage?”

“No,” the boy says a third time, and as Arthes rests on a sword’s edge of indecision--let him leave quietly or call out trumpet-loud to her brother--he wrings his hands like he is squeezing fear out his skin, and says, “Where got you that scar, my wife?”

“At the Battle of the Gleni,” Arthes tells him, “when Cei was felled by an axe to the shoulder and I lent my shield to his protection.”

“Have,” Gwynfor says, and stops to clear his throat. “Have you such another a scar?”

Scarlet is still creeping up his throat and over his cheeks, his ears red as carnelian, but his eyes are upon her face, and his hands, Arthes thinks with the slowness that is her wont off the battlefield, shake but not with terror. It is a potent thing, to be eighteen and standing before a warlord wearing glory on bare skin, a thing to greet with desire indistinguishable from fear to the watching eye. The memory of it fails this night to draw horror up into her heart: outside the doors are her guard replete with meat and ale and alert still, among her councillors Morgant pulling at the ears of the eager with his webbed words, in the sleeping chambers Mererid gone stumbling tired and sweetly affectionate; within the doors her husband looking as though he wants to press his mouth to the wounds that might have taken her life, the blows she survived to claim him for her own.

“Here is one got in a sweeter fight,” she tells him, and pushes the armlet with some trouble above her elbow, letting her cloak fall away.

“I cannot see it,” he says, and little wonder with the light so dim and the scar so shallow.

“Then you must step closer, husband, or ask for a scar that cannot yet be seen,” she says, still careful to keep her voice quiet: a difficult task, when she is accustomed to making herself heard above the din of battle, but softly, softly, for the fledgling strayed into a nest of hawks, softly, gently for this boy with his boy’s love for heroes.

“I see it now,” Gwynfor tells her, and she lays her arm in his outstretched hands and stands still as a carved soldier as he traces the path of her scar over the swelling of forearm and into the seam of her elbow with reverent fingers. “It looks cut in with a curved blade.”

“My mother’s brooch-pin,” she tells him, smiling with her face tilted up towards his. “Or my own first, I ought rather say, for I kept it after I was wounded, having paid blood-price for it. I was ten, full young to wear such things, but who would dare gainsay me my spoils?”

“Who would survive such insolence?” he asks her, laughing, just as though his father did not every month find some little quarrel to stretch out her council till belly and heart clamoured for food and respite.

“Will you see my other scars,” she asks him instead, “or sleep? You have had a week of journeying, and Cair lion is no restful place this day.”

“We will sleep if you wish it,” Gwynfor says, and swallows his fears down. “But for myself I fear a sleepless night, with the wish burning behind my eyes to know what battles my warrior has bested, and what signs they have left on her.”

“Here then is another,” she tells him, tugging her tunic up to bare her left leg to the knee. “A hawthorn bush in the Cat Coit Celidon bested me in battle, as we rested from repelling the Saxon horde.”

“Do not trifle with me. If you will it not, say the word and I will abide,” he says, the line of his downturned mouth visible even in the dimness, and the sigh billowing through his chest.

“With you, never,” she says. “Come, put your hand on it if you wish, and you will see that I do not lie.”

It is a raised thing, still, with the battle five years gone. Gwynfor kneels and touches its path down the line of her calf, and looks up at her with eyes glimmering in the near-dark. “Does it hurt still?”

“No longer, but for a year it reminded me to drink deep. The thorn when she pulled it out was long as Leola’s palm, or mine.”

“She has been with you in many battles,” Gwynfor says, quiet, and runs the broad palm of his hand over her calf, soothing.

“Eight years now she has fought as I have, but I beg you will not ask to see her scars so soon,” Arthes says, and laughing hauls him up, letting the hem of her tunic again brush her ankles. “Will you look upon yet other old wounds?”

“If you will show me them,” he says, and then as though it takes courage, adds, “wife!”

“Is it a strange word?” she asks him, waiting for colour to spill forth again. He looks sweet as an apple fit for eating, blushing and looking at her from beneath his lashes.

“Only in its newness,” he tells her with all firmness.

“Then we will hasten our acquaintance,” she says, still smiling, and thinking a moment pulls her tunic over her head and stands before him in subgalicum and strophium.

Gwynfor, with the steady caution that first caught her eye, says, “How got you the scar on your left shoulder? The brooch pin again?”

“A cat’s claws, some three days before your party arrived. Mererid found a den of wildcats in the hills and wanted nothing better than to play with the kits. She and her nurse were scratched on the hands they flung up to protect their faces, and their screams brought me to her. I was sore tempted to leave her to their mercies.”

“You love her as a daughter,” he says, smiling soft and small as though it comes as a sweet surprise.

“I have never thought of her as anything else,” Arthes replies, with as much honesty as she can give him so early. “She has been from birth in my household.”

He nods in agreement; it is a thing all know, their little family riding or walking, always together, the spearhead of the court: Morgant ahead on his Gallic horse and then she and Mererid, pale hair streaming down their backs or held back in heavy braids. Behind them, invisible to all eyes but hers and Morgant’s, the threatening figure of Alwyn Orcades, king and warrior, violator of women.

“And what gave you this,” Gwynfor asks, and touches her belly above the knotting of the subgalicum as though he can enter her mind and draw her thoughts into the air.

“No battle,” she says, and pulls his hand from it. “An ambush, nine years ago, when Morgant and I were riding home to Cair lion with Mererid. His fore-riders had gone ahead, and the wagons fallen behind, and it was a difficult time we had, only two against eight riders armed with axes. Another handspan deeper and it would have severed my guts and let all my blood run out. Mayhap I love Mererid so because she is all the child I ever have hope of raising; I am not like to have my own, and scarce have time to sit of a morning with the fosterlings in Cair lion, or with the children of my friends.”

“I am sorry to hear it if it sorrows you,” he says, still steady. “If you wished for motherhood it is a grave ill to have that joy taken by a blade.”

“You need not fear,” she tells him, now careful herself in this conversation more meet for the council hall than bare before her bed, “that I would not put any child of yours upon my knee if you chose to acknowledge one.”

“I do not say I never shall father a child,” he tells her, answering two questions together. “I have seen how the desire for fatherhood grips men of middle years as a fever. But I was scarce nine years of age, when I saw you and Morgant ap Gwrlais ride into Carn Brea. Every year since then I have striven to be closer to you. I am not fitted for battle, but had you no need of me to seal an alliance, I would have served you in council, or as a bard, or taught the children fostered in Cair lion.”

“You were taught in Cernyw,” she says, wondering. “your father gave you to my brother to foster when you were eleven. We wondered at it then, for all his crying at council the year before it had been to urge me to heed other advisors than Morgant. Nor did he stop after.”

“I was eleven,” Gwynfor laughs. “Would you have me change the mind of a man more stubborn than the mountains he calls his own? I had work enough for two years to be allowed to go to him in Celliwig.”

“I am not blaming you,” Arthes counters, laughing with him, and catches and kisses his hands, not soft as she’d thought, but callused in unfamiliar fashion, from cutting wands of oak and ash, or plucking upon the strings of his harp. He has a bard’s voice, and a bard’s skill of persuasion, and some but not all of the druidic skills Morgant has himself gleaned like a beggar wandering reaped fields after the harvest has been carried to some iron-barred granary. A boy of words strung together, like ivy upon his father’s rooted oak, drawing birds, butterflies, browsing deer in their herds. And a bear, she thinks laughing to herself, a she-bear longing for colour and sweetness, and kisses his hands again, and the thin skin of his wrist where the blood vessels show blue.

**Author's Note:**

> People Names:  
> Arthur (bear hero, rock) → Arthes (she bear)  
> Anwen (blessed)→ Alwyn (blessed) [MORGAUSE, from Orcades meaning of the Orkneys]  
> Cei: Sir Kay  
> Gwenhwyfar (shining)→ Gwynfor (great fair)  
> Mareddud (lord, sea day)→Mererid (pearl) [MORDRED  
> Morgan (bright sea)→ Morgant (circle of the sea) ap Gwrlais  
> Lancelot (attendant, ruler, of the land) → Leola (lioness)
> 
> Place Names:  
> Cair lion: Caerleon, one of Arthur's seats and the most significant till later overtaken by Camelot  
> Cat Coit Celidon: A forest in Celidon/Caledonia/Scotland  
> Carn Brea: A Cornish site that has seen settlements from the Neolithic period onwards.  
> Celliwig: Place in Cornwall with one of four Cadburys named for Cador, whose role as Arthur's older half-brother I have usurped here for Morgant. Guinevere *did* get taught/fostered by Cador.  
> Cernyw: Cornish name for Cornwall.
> 
> Clothing Names:  
> subgalicum and strophium: Roman women's underthings I figured worked well enough for royalty in sub-Roman Britain  
> braccae: Gallic and more generally Celtic trousers


End file.
